Planned Philly-Upper Bucks rail line shortened

Instead of almost reaching Lehigh County line, it's cut back to Pennridge area.

A commuter rushes to make the early train from Lansdale to Philadelphia.… (MORNING CALL FILE PHOTO )

April 26, 2011|By Scott Kraus, OF THE MORNING CALL

With austerity the new watchword in both state and federal governments, Bucks and Montgomery County transportation planners have scaled back a long-running effort to restore passenger rail service between Philadelphia and upper Bucks County.

Their proposal for the Lansdale-Quakertown rail corridor no longer reaches past Quakertown to the village of Shelly near the Lehigh County line as it did as recently as 2007.

It now stops just south of Sellersville along Route 309, the Pennridge area of Upper Bucks.

With a smaller, $182 million price tag, the 8-mile extension of SEPTA transit service would, planners hope, rank higher on the Federal Transit Administration's efficiency scale, giving it a better chance of qualifying for federal assistance.

"We've really tried to understand the climate we are in and come up with something that is workable," said Valarie A. Discafani, a planner with Jacobs Engineering, which produced the Lansdale-Quakertown Corridor Alternatives Analysis study.

Even the smaller, scaled-back version of the original 20-mile rail project will be difficult to fund, said Leo Bagley, assistant director of the Montgomery County Planning Commission and a veteran transportation planner.

"The current funding environment is not good for highway or transit period," Bagley said at a public input session Tuesday night at the Hatfield Township offices.

It's likely the state would have to shoulder a greater burden than in past transit projects, he said.

Even if funding were quickly secured, environmental reviews and design could take up to seven years to complete, Discafani said.

None of that softened the blow for Quakertown Borough Councilwoman Michele Scarborough or Planning Commission member Doug Propst, who sat in the back row of the meeting room listening to Discafani explain how extending the line to their borough was now considered too costly.

Quakertown has been working on a plan to reshape its downtown to make it more pedestrian-friendly, and officials had been hoping rail service would eventually be a part of that transformation.

"I'm disappointed that the rail service isn't going to come up as far as they said it would," Scarborough said.

Quakertown contractor and developer Mike Cygan, who owns property near the borough's idle but rehabbed train station, said he hopes that if the truncated version of the Lansdale-Quakertown rail service is built, it can be linked to Quakertown with shuttle buses.

"I think a lot of the success of the Quakertown area will depend on how they are able to produce bus service to feed the Pennridge stop," Cygan said.

The shorter Lansdale-to-Pennridge line would serve about 5,200 riders a day and cost $5 million a year to operate. It would add four stations north of Lansdale on the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority's R5 line, stopping in Hatfield, Souderton, Telford and along Route 309 south of Sellersville. It would earn a medium-high efficiency rating from the Federal Transit Administration.

Extending the line to Shelly near the Lehigh County line would cost $391 million and $9 million a year to operate, serving 6,700 riders daily, according to the alternatives analysis undertaken by Bucks and Montgomery counties. It would earn a medium-low efficiency rating from the federal government.

"This is strictly about getting federal funds," Discafani said.

Restoring service along what was once a Bethlehem-to-Philadelphia passenger rail line has been a 30-year battle. Service to Quakertown was halted in 1981 and the northern part of the line, which winds through Coopersburg, Lower and Upper Saucon townships and Hellertown, is being converted into a bike and pedestrian trail.

Sometimes, it pays to be a little less ambitious, said Matthew Mitchell, a member of the Delaware Valley Association of Rail Passengers.

"It is shorter than the originally planned project, but it has a chance of getting funded and built," Mitchell said.